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Home Fires

On Friday night, the expatriate fiction writers Sana Krasikov, Yiyun Li, and Manil Suri talked with The New Yorker’s deputy fiction editor, Cressida Leyshon, about their native homelands—Ukraine, China, and India, respectively—which figure strongly in their work and have gone through drastic changes since their departure. Upheaval in their countries of origin had given the writers a sense of alienation, but also created an emotional distance that enabled them to return as reporters, mining details for future work. “I had a lot of questions about why people behave in certain ways,” Li said. She described an old man in Beijing shelling peanuts on a park bench, who became irate when she approached. “I like that man,” she said. “I think he was right to be yelling at me.”

The writers spoke about straddling cultures. Krasikov said, “In assimilating, when returning there for material, you learn to be more of a supplicant. Here, it’s all about standing out. There, you should be”—as the saying goes—“shorter than the grass and quieter than the water.”

“Home,” they agreed, can be elusive, and the conversation at times dipped into elegaic tones. Krasikov, whose family left Ukraine in 1987, returned to Moscow recently for a funeral, and described the reunion of her mother’s friends: “They could travel back there, but they could never really reach it—because that world was gone.” Suri believed that it was only after he was accepted as a “prodigal son” that he began to look forward to returning to Bombay: “India’s something that gets into your blood and is very hard to get out, and I’ve given up now.” Going back to Beijing, for Li, “is a fascinating experience only because I can leave,” she said. “I don’t feel at home, at home.”